There are no footfalls here, but, if one listens closely, one can hear the absence of wings. We move about like shadows, crawling across the landscape in two dimensions, arms and legs akimbo, time pointers with no time to point to. We are unsprung watches, clocks with no sense of chronology, false memories of false events. We do not nod in passing. Eye avoidance is an art. No one looks up because that’s where we’ve been.

I move across the face of a building. I do not slide inside. No one goes inside here. Inside, we disappear. Cloudy days are hell. Nights pandemonium, terror, loss. We think sometimes of ending it, those dark periods, but there is no stone we can grasp, no trigger we can pull, no rooftop we can throw ourselves from and not survive. No bones to smash, no blood to let, no breath to extinguish.

Once, I think I see you. I open my mouth but no name comes out. Names, like memories, like actions—like love—require depth. The feathers of you scatter, leaves in sympathy with the coming snow. A blight drips from my eyes. Beneath me, footsteps stumble. Regret echoes.

I’ve made a mistake. I’ve looked up.

Robert L. Dean, Jr.

is the author of Pulp (Finishing Line Press, 2022); The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing, ekphrastic poems and short fictions in response to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press, 2020); and At the Lake with Heisenberg (Spartan Press, 2018).

His work has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared or is forthcoming in: Chiron Review; The Ekphrastic Review; Flint Hills Review; Heartland! Poetry of Love, Resistance & Solidarity; I-70 Review; Illya’s Honey; KYSO Flash; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Midwest Quarterly; MockingHeart Review; October Hill Magazine; Red River Review; River City Poetry; Sheila-Na-Gig online; Shot Glass; Suisun Valley Review; Synkroniciti; Thorny Locust; Waco WordFest Anthology 2022; and the Wichita Broadside Project.

A native Kansan, Dean studied music composition with Dr. Walter Mays at Wichita State University before going on the road as a bass player, conductor, and arranger; he was a professional musician for 30 years, playing with acts such as Jesse Lopez, Bo Didley, Frank Sinatra Jr., Vic Damone, Jim Stafford, Kenny Rankin, B. W. Stevenson, and the Dallas Jazz Orchestra. He put in a stint with the house band at the Fairmont Hotel Venetian Room in Dallas. While living in Dallas, he also worked 20 years for The Dallas Morning News and made the transition from music to writing before moving back to Kansas in 2007.

Dean is a member of The Writers Place and the Kansas Authors Club. He lives in Augusta, Kansas, midway between the Air Capital of the World and the Flint Hills, and enjoys chess, backgammon, and film noir.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Finding the Door: One Writer’s Approach to Ekphrasis, an essay on craft by Robert L. Dean, Jr. in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 13, May 2022)

⚡ Two of Dean’s ekphrastic works in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 5, October 2020): Impression, CNF after Berthe Morisot’s painting Woman and Child on a Balcony; and Eyes on You, a poem after Aurore Uwase Munyabera’s painting Conflict Resolution

⚡ Windmill, ekphrastic poem inspired by Dean’s maternal grandfather; published in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019) and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

⚡ Metal Man, ekphrastic poem inspired by a 1955 photograph of Dean’s paternal grandfather in the Boeing machine shop; published in The Ekphrastic Review (28 July 2018) and nominated for Best of the Net

⚡ Llama, 1957, ekphrastic haibun by Robert L. Dean, Jr., inspired by Inge Morath’s photograph A Llama in Times Square; published in The Ekphrastic Review (13 January 2018)

⚡ Hopper and Dean: Interview and poems in River City Poetry (Fall 2017)